Mike Lee was nice enough to blog the many books our little group of IAs excitedly ran our fingers through the other night.
Category: Unfiled
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Already at War?
There are military personel in the subways wearing fatigues and brandishing automatic weapons. It reminds me of what someone said of Isreal, that the civilians are always in a state of war.
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Joel on Software
I’m finally making my way in a serious way around Joel’s site, which is full of software development goodness. His Book Reviews are an interesting read…‘I say time and time again that the reason good UI design matters is that it makes people happy. I mean that literally. If your UI design is good, the people who use your software will be happier. If it’s bad, they will be unhappy.’
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Rosenfeld & Krug
Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug are teaming up for a three city seminar tour, Lou covering Enterprise Information Architecture and Steve Usability. These guys are both highly experienced and a lot of fun, the events should be a good time.
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Applianceness
I just discovered Appliance Studio, a company in Bristol UK dedicated to information appliance design. They have a straightfoward way of explaining what they call Applianceness summarized as ‘Successful appliances become everyday things, do one thing well, work well with other appliances, and reward their users with the sense of job done.’
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Magazine Update
We are now blessed with the presence of Shareholder Value magazine. This while Shift and New Architect cease publication (in the latter case one might be tempted to ask, will Adaptive Path be relegated to publishing on their own site only? ;-). At least there’s Tekka, which may be more likely to succeed with low overhead, subscription income, and strong editing.
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International IA Connection
Peter is a little tired of how U.S.-centric the information architecture field can be, so he’s starting an AIfIA-sponsored initiative to do something about it. Get on the mailing list at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/aifia-translation. Hopefully we’ll see some translations of seminal IA texts and more come from it.
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Get Yer Kicks
While I paid a whopping $49 for my Sidekick you can now get one for free. Actually, if you do the math, they are paying you a penny to get it. In any case, I’ve had mine for a few weeks now and I’m quite happy.
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Secret Pleasures of Open Source
I think one of the little pleasures of running open source software is the non-corporate tone of code comments and documentation, which can sometimes sound like this cool SysAdmin sitting you next to you in the data center, smoking a cigarette and reading The Economist…
Most of the features discussed in this article are only available to you if you are running Apache 1.2 or later. Of course, if you are not running Apache 1.2 or later, you need to upgrade immediately, if not sooner. Go on. Do it now. We’ll wait. [from the Apache docs]
A bit like Zeldman, no? This tone even carries through to O’Reilly’s articles online, where the irony of controlling Apache via the Mac UI is not lost…
Because we’ve made changes to Apache’s configuration file, we now need to restart Apache. The easiest way to do this is via our Sharing preference panel. Much like we started the sharing preference in part one of this series, we can stop and start to enable our changes. Do this now. Chuckle once or twice, if you must.
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Re-Cooper’d Cooper
Redesigned: Cooper.com. Not sure how long this has been up, but it’s certainly worth a look to see what they think is a proper website.
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Ready for a Parody?
From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (das Heimatland!) comes Ready.gov which makes pretty good use of information graphics, but which also positions it for some damn funny parodies. Link courtesy of Charles, whose blog I haven’t located yet.
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NewsMonster Appropriately Titled
I just stayed up late to conduct an over-the-phone usability test with someone in India, and then discovered NewsMonster, an ‘advanced weblog manager, reputation system, micropayment economy, and semantic web application.‘ I’ll have to investigate it more after a bit of sleep, but it makes my Blog Reader proposal look rather timid, and beat Nick’s Lafayette Project out of the gate. So far the examples I’ve seen in this genre have been user interfaces as an afterthought slapped on great networking ideas.
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Ex-fish in the Ocean
Some of my Swedish friends from Razorfish are getting some attention for their work at Ocean Observations. I like this bit on their contact page: ‘You will find us in the western parts of Södermalm in Stockholm. In a former car repair shop on Heleneborgsgatan we sweat for our clients, try to make them happy with our solutions, and when visiting we bid them a great view of the island Långholmen which is our beautiful neighbour. If you give us some notice, homemade cakes and milkshakes will be served.‘ Sigh.